Grid hosting providers may offer advantages over dedicated servers, but they're not immune to downtime. Mosso, a utility computing start-up launched earlier this year with backing from Rackspace, has experienced a significant outage today. The mosso.com web site was offline for more than an hour this morning after a series of shorter outages yesterday.

Mosso uses a "hosting system" of clusters of servers, an approach initially seen in enterprise hosting, which can offer advantages in redundancy and performance. The company is one of a growing number of hosting providers moving to grid hosting as an alternative to discount dedicated servers, which have been enormously popular with hosting resellers and power users. Improved reliability is among the key selling points for grid systems.

A dynamically updating chart of the performance of the Mosso.com is available. Netcraft offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides detailed uptime charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.

This year's hot trend in web hosting is grid computing, which employs server clusters to bring the advantages of enterprise-level infrastructure to affordable web hosting plans. As with any trend in web hosting, it hasn't taken long for a price war to break out.

On Tuesday Los Angeles hosting firm Media Temple unveiled GridServer, offering industrial-strength specs for just $20 a month. The account comes with 100 gigabytes of disk space, 1 terabyte of monthly data transfer and the ability to host up to 100 domains. Two other prominent grid initiatives launched this year by dedicated hosting companies, ServePath's UtilityServe and Rackspace-backed Mosso, price their grid hosting plans at $99 a month. Media Temple's pricing could also prove disruptive to shared hosting providers with clustered hosting plans, including NetFirms and Cartika Hosting, which offer cheaper monthly pricing ($9.99 and $14.99, respectively) but much lower allowances for disk space and bandwidth.

Netcraft's September competition saw many internet users battling it out to gain a top spot in our phishing site reporters list.

To show our appreciation to the community, Netcraft will be sending a top of the range "Thanks for all the Phish" commemorative iPod to the five people who reported the largest number of phishing reports accepted during September.

The winners are: Leo, Giovanni, David, Patrick and Jerrid. Many thanks for your efforts! Each phishing site that is reported vastly reduces the number of victims falling prey to fraudulent activity on the Web. Netcraft has now received, reviewed and blocked more than 200,000 unique URLs reported to us as phishing sites.

The Netcraft Toolbar, which is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, serves as a giant neighborhood watch scheme for the Internet: members who encounter a phishing fraud can act to defend the larger community of users against the attack. Once the first recipients of a phishing mail have reported the target URL, it is blocked for toolbar users who subsequently access the URL and widely disseminated attacks simply mean that the phishing attack will be reported and blocked sooner.

In recent reviews Ziff-Davis comments "In testing on live phishing sites, IE 7 RC1 failed to identify as many phishing sites as Netcraft's free IE toolbar. " while the Washington Post remarked "I've visited countless phishing sites in the past few months, and Netcraft's toolbar has done its job almost unfailingly."

Rackspace is the most reliable hosting company for September 2006, followed closely by managed hosting company Datapipe and Katarre, a colocation and dedicated hosting provider based in Corvallis, Ore.

Rackspace, a managed hosting provider based in San Antonio, Texas, has been a mainstay in our reliability rankings since we began tracking hosting company performance in 2003. This is the fifth time this year that Rackspace has been the most reliable hoster, compared to six times in 2005. The home page for the Rackspace.com web site did not have a measurable outage from March 2004 through November 2005, when it experienced three minutes of downtime.

Eight of the 10 most reliable hosters run their sites on Linux with the two remaining having Unknown OS.

In the October 2006 survey we received responses from 97,932,447 sites, an increase of 1.08 million from last month. That moderate growth follows four straight months of blockbuster gains, guaranteeing that 2006 will surpass 2005 in the record books for largest single-year hostname growth. The survey has added nearly 23.9 million sites in the first 10 months of 2006, well above the previous record for annual numerical site growth of 17.1 million from last year. At its current 2006 growth rate of 2.3 million-plus sites per month, the Web Server Survey could top 100 million sites before the end of the year.

There are only small shifts in market share for web server software. Windows' share improves slightly this month, as gains at Go Daddy offset some slippage among sites hosted at Microsoft.